News

Polar Bear Farm Software has recently released a somewhat groundbreaking piece of third-party software for the Apple iPhone called PBF ShowTime. ShowTime's claim to fame is that it brings video capture/recording to the iPhone - a feature not natively found on the iPhone (at least not as of firmware 1.1.2). Though other experimental applications that record video on the iPhone have been released, none have been as well-formed or fully featured as ShowTime.

That's not to say that ShowTime doesn't have it's issues. It certainly does. First, a look at what ShowTime can do:

Though seemingly simple, that's nothing to squawk at. This simple feature list is, as mentioned, more than we've seen from other attempts. Take a look at the following video to see ShowTime in action

Newly available via Installer/AppTapp is iSMS, a native text messaging client replacement for the iPhone. iSMS - also called weiSMS, is partially based on WeSMS, a Chinese SMS application, and provides a list of features/enhancemens not found in the standard iPhone SMS application. These lacking features have been high on iPhone owners' lists of gripes with the iPhone.

Though very much a beta, officially only a "preview release", iSMS provides many functions not available when sending text messages on the iPhone through the included interface. The two most prominent of these added features are the ability to send a text message to multiple recipients (or bulk SMS) and the ability to forward received text messages.

The list of major SMS features not normally available on the iPhone which iSMS adds includes the following:

Shares of Apple (AAPL) have reached a milestone for the year, with shares opening trading over $200 today. Although shares of the Cupertino based computer giant have crested past the $200 mark in both of the last two days, end of day trading has seen share prices retreat back below the $200 mark before closing.

Shares have risen over 60 percent since the introduction of the wildly popular iPhone at the end of June of this year. Sales of the iPhone, combined with the continuing growth of Apple's market share in the PC sales arena, have catapulted the share price of Apple's stock.

Perhaps most importantly, analyst firms remain almost unanimously optimistic about Apple's continuing growth. Almost all of the analyst firms on the street have target prices above $200, with Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster leading the

Efiko Software has just announced version 2.0 of their very popular iPhone ringtone creation and installation software, called iPhoneRingToneMaker. Though there are several methods and software packages iPhone owners can use to get free ringtones on their Apple iPhones, iPhoneRingToneMaker (along with iToner) is on a short list of these solutions which will allow users to make a ringtone from existing music on their computers, are easy to use, and are well supported by their creators.

Of course, all of this easy-to-use goodness comes at a price, albeit an extremely modest one. Purchasing ringtones through iTunes costs basically $0.99, should you buy

It has been widely reported recently that iPhone sold as "unlocked" via Orange in France are not truly unlocked. Early reports indicated that this was because of a SIM country lock in effect on the unlocked phones. As it turns out, there is no actual country lock in effect, but due to either intentional crippling on Apple's part or simply a lack of proper support - unlocked 1.1.2 French iPhones crash when attempting to make calls or send text messages when a foreign SIM card is inserted. Now, thanks to a new tweak called iWorld, these phones can be freed up for use anywhere in the world using any SIM card.

Like all other third party tweaks and software, installing iWorld requires that you jailbreak your iPhone. Owners of 1.1.2 iPhones can jailbreak their phones by downgrading to firmware version 1.1.1, using the jailbreakme.com (or AppSnapp) 1-step jailbreak process, and properly upgrading to 1.1.2. Once jailbroken, users can quickly and easily install iWorld via